In 1918, the auction house
Henry Sotheran and Co offered for sale a bundle of autograph writings by Coleridge, including both published and unpublished pieces of poetry and prose. Some, although by no means all, of this latter material was later published, which means this catalogue remains our only clue for a number of intriguing, hitherto unknown pieces of Coleridgean prose and poetry. Below is what Sotheran were hoping to sell, all-in, for £175. I mark what I believe to be previously unnoticed material with ‘[*]’:
1. ‘10 pp octavo, mostly dated from The Grove, Highgate [Mr. James Gillman's], June 1st, 1822, to February 11th, 1832, to
MR. or MRS. CHARLES ADERS, the latter the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Raphael Smith, the engraver, Euston Square, and Laurence Pountney Lane, City, long, closely-written letters of very intimate character, full of discussions on
ETHICS,
METAPHYSICS, LITERATURE,
RELIGION, etc., mentioning
CHARLES LAMB,
ROBERT SOUTHEY,
EDWARD IRVING,
DORA WORDSWORTH, etc., but most remarkable for their constant allusions to a young lady by whom the poet seems to have been attracted at that time; her name, which happens very often in connexion with affectionate messages, has been carefully deleted quite a long time ago, possibly soon after the letters were received, but by careful scrutiny and comparison of the deletions can be seen to have been
ELLEN KELLY; in one letter
COLERIDGE writes her face is like a Corelli Concerto (the VIIIth) a silent music, he also several times expresses a wish that the
ADERS should come to live with the
GILLMANS, and bring the lady with them.’ The catalogue includes the following excerpts from this bundle:
[i] ‘It is a maxim with me, to make Life as continuous as possible, by linking on the Present to the Past. ... The Present is a phantom known only by its pining, if it do not breathe the vital air of the Future : and what is the Future, but the Image of the Past projected on the mist of the Unknown, and seen with a glory round its head. But where shall we find the Eternal, which gives the Three in One, and makes all exist in each? It is Love-Love that like Flame can pass successively, from this to this, ever the same essentially, and yet taking up into its character the nature of the object on which it finds its sustenance. I of course am a stranger to your dear now spiritual Mother ; but as by the beauty of a Daughter we may form an idea of the beauty and there is an almost divine Beauty) of Age that formed the shrine of holy love in the Present, so by Mrs. Aders' Countenance, Tones, and Movements can I interpret what your Mother must have been—for no man can truly love diversely or diverse objects.’ [CL 5:266]
[ii] [*]‘Mr. Green like myself is half German—and in the best sense, all German.’
[iii] ‘If Mr. R. [Reece] could give me time, unused as for so many many years I have been to versifying of any kind, and dried up I fear, my poetic spring will be found by the severities of austere Metaphysics, I will attempt it [some translation] for him.’ [CL 5:271]
[iv] ‘To be with one for any continuance and in any bond of sympathy, and not to feel attached to Germans, and to prize the intellectual growth of Protestant Germany, is scarcely possible.’ [CL 5:287]
[v] ‘I am resolved to tell Miss [Kelly], as soon as ever the Rose makes its appearance on her cheeks, that she deserves to have a gray haired Poet's kiss inflicted on her for the gloom, her sad naughty sore throat has thrown over our anticipations ... Be assured dear Madam! that if there be any medical efficacy in fervent and affectionate Wishing, your dear [child? this word deleted] will not long remain on a sick bed.’ [CL 5:366-67]
[vi] ‘Mr. Green ... is among the very best men I know. But probably you may have heard Mr. Robinson (that Pineapple of a Crab, as Charles Lamb says) speak of him.’ [CL 5:367]
[vii] [*] ‘Give my love to Miss [Kelly, this word deleted] and tell her that spite of absence and dreary weather she buds and blossoms on the Green-house of my fairest Recollections.’
[viii] [*] ‘Tell [dear Ellen, these words deleted], that I do not forget her—because I never forget her or can, she being one of the letters in the name written on the inward tablet.’
[ix] ‘My dear Friend, and (by the privilege of silvery locks and heart pure as burnished silver, in defiance of Beauty and Genius I dare add, beloved Sister!'[)] (Then follows a very long letter, to Mrs. Aders, 4 pp. 4to. relating to three copies of a portrait of himself by Madame von Predl.] [CL 6:651f]
[x] [*] ‘Another long letter is written in the form of an ‘EXTRACT FROM THE DOMESTIC AND LITERARY INTELLIGENCER, No, I, OCTOBER 12TH, 1825’: the supposed extract being a pretended press puff of “THE INVITATION, an epic Drama, in the style of Homer and Shakespeare. Finer models the Authors could not have selected”; this is followed by a Synopsis of a “Scena on the East Cliff of Ramsgate,” in which the writer and his friends figure as Esteecy [his pet pun on his own initials], Philophilé, Venus and Hygeia, the latter “enters a flying Machine and mounts aloft.” The whole forms a very remarkable Fantasia. At the end is a Letter by MR. GILLMAN stating that writing and talking what he calls nonsense, is an infallible symptom, that our dear Friend is in good spirits and in his bettermost health.’
[xi] ‘In this bleak World of mutabilities where what is not changed, is chilled, and in this winter-time of my own Being, I resemble a Bottle of Brandy in Spitzbergen—a Dram of Alcoholic Fire in the centre of a cake of Ice.’ [CL 6, 532]
[xii] ‘I have long had it in my wish and imagination to attempt the founding of a Teutonic Club, that should be connected with the gradual purchase of a permanent German Library in London.’ [CL 6:544]
[xiii] ‘He [Mr. Watson] loves Germany & Germans—dislikes the Italians, and ABHORS the French—all as a good man ought to do—just as I would have had it.’ [CL 6:553]
[xiv] ‘From Mr. Reynolds I have heard—that my two Poems, the first for an engraving, and entitled “Boccaccio's Garden”, and the other, a wild and somewhat long Ballad, are all they can print this year, owing to the disproportionate length of Sir W. Scott's Prose (that was to have been a Canongate Tale, had not Mr. Heath outbid).’ [CL 6:757]
[xv] ‘I should like to suggest to some of his [Ackermann's] able artists what seems to me no bad subject for a Caricature viz. The REFORM BILL, allegorized as a Loco-motive Steam-Engine, with all its smoke and fury, and by a long train of waggons, carts, etc., dragged on by it, one or two large caravans containing the ministerial Majorities, etc, ... each of the waggons should represent some one of our dead weights, and dead blunders of the present Ministry-Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Irish Tythes ... with the Steam Engine run mad, over hedge & ditch.’ [CL 6:883]
Some of these letters later appeared in the
Collected Letters (the first, third, fourth, sixth and last are all known to scholars, as is the ‘Bottle of Brandy in Spitzbergen’ letter and the ‘founding of a Teutonic Club’ letter, plus the letter that references Mr Watson loving Germans but hating Italians); but so far as I'm aware the second passage here, most of the letters that refer to STC's old-man passion for Ellen Kelley, and the letter that references ‘
THE INVITATION’ have none of them been published. Were the Ellen Kelley letters, in effect, suppressed, because they were in some sense indiscreet? Tantalising!
Aders was a German merchant resident in London, who in July 1820 married an Englishwoman, Eliza Smith (daughter, as the catalogue notes, of the painter John Raphael Smith). Earl Leslie Griggs includes a number of letters from STC to either Mr or Mrs Aders, the earliest dating from December 1820. He has no letter dated June 1st, 1822, although he does include a letter to Charles Aders dated February 11th, 1832. The reference to ‘Miss [Kelley,
heavily inked out] whose face is a Corelli Concerto (the VIIIth) a silent Music’ is from a letter to Eliza Aders dated 26th December 1822 [Griggs 5:262], Arcangelo Corelli being the famous 17th-century Italian violinist and composer. STC had attended a dinner party at the Aders on the 22nd Dec, with many other people (Henry Crabb Robinson has a detailed account of this, ‘Coleridge was the star of the evening’, and musicians had been hired to perform, presumably Corelli being among the pieces played—the 8th concerto is called ‘The Christmas’ (you can
listen to it here), so it would have been appropriate.
What else? Well, the poem STC here calls ‘Boccaccio's Garden’ was actually published as ‘The Garden of Boccaccio’ in
The Keepsake for 1829 (edited by Reynolds), and reprinted soon after in Coleridge's 1829
Poetical Works [CC 16:652]. The ‘wild and somewhat long Ballad’ must be ‘Alice du Clos; or, The Forked Tongue. A Ballad’ which also appeared in the 1829
Keepsake. The cod-heroic ‘
THE INVITATION, an epic Drama, in the style of Homer and Shakespeare’, however much of it there originally was, has been altogether lost.
[*] 2. ‘
HOLOGRAPH MS., of an
UNPUBLISHED POEM. “
ON QUITTING OXFORD STREET, BRISTOL, FOR NETHER STOWEY, NEW YEAR'S DAY, 1795, WITH MRS. C. AND HARTLEY, THEN AN INFANT, ADDRESSED TO MR. MAURICE OUR MEDICAL FRIEND, AT WHOSE HOUSE WE HAD PASSED THE PRECEEDING EVENING, AND SENT OFF FROM CROSS, ABOUT 19 MILES FROM BRISTOL”; a Poem of 7 Verses, and Verses 1-3 of “
PART THE SECOND: SENT BY THE POST THE SAME EVENING FROM BRIDGWATER”—at the foot of which Coleridge has written, “I have laboured in vain to recollect the remaining 7 or 8 Stanzas”; 4 pp. quarto., watermarked 1828.’ The catalogue gives us four lines of this poem:
My first-born! my bright-eyed, with three-cornered mouth,
Thee the winds for a while their own murmours may teach
Till the Cuckoo and Nightingale come from the South
They shall set thee, my Babe, thy first Lesson in Speech!
The catalogue adds: ‘the verses previous to this very pleasing one are of a humorous and somewhat coarse description.’ These four lines have never, so far as I can see, been published.
3. ‘
SOMNOLENT EXTEMPORE, EYES HALF CLOSED AND HEAD NODDING TIME TO AN AMERICAN LADY’:
You came from o'er the Waters,
From Famed Columbia's land;
And you have Sons and Daughters
And Money to command.
But we are all the Children
Of one great Lord of Love;
Whose Mercy, like a Mill-drain
Runs over from above.
This poem was published under the title ‘To Baby Bates’. J C C Mays [CC 16:653] notes ‘the verses are known only from a transcript in a contemporary album and a transcript of a transcript reported in 1888.’ The version he prints in the Princeton
Poetical Works is four stanzas, with minor variants of stanzas 1 and 2 (‘And Money to command’ is, in Mays, ‘And Money at command’, and there are differences in capitalisation and punctuation).
4. ‘
THE TENDER CORN’:
The Rose that blushes like the morn
Bedecks the valleys low,
And so dost thou, o tender Corn,
My Angelina's Toe.
This is published by Mays as ‘To a Young Lady Complaining of a Corn’ [CC 16:539], although he speculatively dates this to ‘Jun-Jul 1817’ which is too early; its appearance in this batch of papers must mean it comes from the later 1820s. Mays has ‘And so dost thou, sweet infant Corn’ for ‘And so dost thou, o tender Corn’.
[*] 5. ‘
THREE OTHER SHORT UNPUBLISHED POEMS: LOVER'S REVERIE; and
THE YOUNG
TANNER’; and some Prose Remarks respecting the same, ending, O that the Songs and Songlets
here collected were but set to Charming Music by some modern Haydn—I might then exclaim!
Blest be the man that set these Lays!
He claims our thanks as well as praise!
Since had it not been for the Music
The Words had made both me and you sick.—S. T. COLERIDGE.
We can only guess at the nature and specifics of the three short poems, although STC's facetious quatrain has never been reprinted.
6. ‘
ORIGINAL HOLOGRAPH MS. of the following
UNPUBLISHED EPITAPH, 1 p. quarto, watermarked 1828’:
Here lies our Black Cat!
Caught many a Rat:
Till—sad Exchange!
He caught the Mange:
And, no Cure found,
In a Water-Tub
We drown'd, drown'd, drown'd,
Drown'd, drown'd, drown'd,
Drown'd, drown'd—drown'd
DON BELZEBUB!!
This poem is printed, it seems from this very autograph, by Mays [CC 1:654]
7. ‘
ORIGINAL HOLOGRAPH MS. on
GOETHE, 1 p. octavo: “What more aggrieves me in the greater part of Goethe's Compositions is the Irrememberable. The sorrows of Werther, the Mignon of old Harper of his Wilhelm-Meister, his Gorz von Berlichingen, and his Faustus, with many others, all are such glaring exceptions, that they might seem to justify the direct contrary”—etc.’ Earl Leslie Griggs prints this in his
Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1932).
8. ‘
ORIGINAL HOLOGRAPH NOTE on
SCHLEIERMACHER'S SERMONS, 2 pp. octavo., signed, and dated Jan. 23rd, 1826, with a
P.S. mentioning
CHARLES LAMB: “You will think it worth my noticing that in a little blank verse Poem addressed by me to Charles Lamb on his Sister's Illness in my 23rd year I had expressed the same sentiments as Schleiermacher in the conclusion of his 2nd Sermon, and in my 24th year had already publicly recanted and renounced them in a Note to the Poem in the first edition of my Juvenile Poems!”-etc.’ This one is in the
Collected Letters.
9. ‘To
ELIZA, IN PAIN’;
ORIGINAL HOLOGRAPH MS. of an unpublished Poem, of 12 Verses, 3 pp. quarto., signed, and dated June 3rd, 1826, addressed to
MRS. ADERS, the subject of the poem, and enclosed in one of the above-mentioned letters of the same date’:
Twas my last waking thought—how can it be.
That thou, sweet Friend! such anguish should'st endure?
And hence the apish Dwarf, I dreamt to see,
Who told the cause and mock'd me with the cure—
This is in May's
Poetical Works [16:618], although with a couple of quite significant variants:
Twas my last waking thought, how it could be.
That thou, sweet friend, such anguish should'st endure?
When straight from Dreamland came a Dwarf, and he,
Could tell the cause, forsooth, and knew the cure.
